


Seven Blocks in the Dark

by hotpinkcoffee



Category: It's Always Sunny in Philadelphia
Genre: Child Abuse, Child Neglect, Childhood Friends, Domestic Violence, Drug Use, Gen, Implied/Referenced Child Abuse, Implied/Referenced Rape/Non-con, Mental Health Issues, Obsessive-Compulsive Disorder, Recreational Drug Use, Referenced Child Sexual Abuse, Referenced prostitution, Religion, Swearing, Underage Drinking, Underage Drug Use, Vignettes, incarceration
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-01-02
Updated: 2020-01-02
Packaged: 2021-02-27 13:46:45
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 7,384
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/22077931
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/hotpinkcoffee/pseuds/hotpinkcoffee
Summary: The only thing Mac's ever been good at is make-believe. Imagination games from the ages of nine to thirteen.
Relationships: Charlie Kelly & Bonnie Kelly, Charlie Kelly & Mac McDonald, Mac McDonald & Bonnie Kelly, Mac McDonald & Luther McDonald, Mac McDonald & Mrs. McDonald
Comments: 5
Kudos: 56





	Seven Blocks in the Dark

“You have to stop calling it stealing, man. It was a rescue operation.” Mac always slows down when they get closer to his house, like he’s passed a finish line and is just jogging to catch his breath the rest of the way home. “People rescue animals all the time. That’s why they call them ‘rescue dogs’.”

“I thought they were called rescue dogs because they have the big barrel around their neck and you can climb in and get carried home.”

Charlie’s house is seven blocks from Mac’s, and by now Mac’s surprised that there isn’t a trail worn in through the asphalt with how often they’ve walked over it. In the summer the heat wafts up off the sidewalk and makes their hair stick to the back of their necks and their backpacks leave sweaty imprints on the clothes between their shoulders. Sometimes they take their shirts off and run wild and bare, but Charlie’s stopped doing that lately and Mac’s got no easy way to carry his clothes today on account of the puppy sealed and wriggling around in his backpack, keening and scratching to get free. 

“That’s not how it works, Charlie.” He shrugs off his backpack and digs around for his housekey somewhere in his pockets. He always misplaces things, but somehow never the housekey. “They call it animal rescue because you rescue the dogs from the shelter. Shelters are awful places for dogs, they beat them and rape them and test shampoo on them. I saw it on TV.”

“That doesn’t sound right.”

The front door whines open. Mac leans in and whispers to Charlie.

“Remember, if my mom asks, we were at school and we just found him.” Mac unzips his back and pulls the white, rumpled puppy out to hold in his arms. It squirms, he squeezes tighter, it mewls and tries to bite him. He closes a fist over its snout and grimaces at the wet slimy nose in his palm. “Ooh, or tell her I won him as a prize for doing good at P.E.”

“She’s not going to ask if we were at school, bro.” Charlie rolls his eyes, and it’s not that Mac doesn’t _see_ it, it’s just that he knows Charlie’s never going to be on his side when it comes to his parents and that that’s part of the toll Mac pays to be a friend of Charlie. It’s a Charlie problem.

Mac shushes him and runs over to his mother in front of the TV, the same place he can find her every afternoon when he gets home from school or from playing hooky. She’s reliable and constant as the sunrise. She makes a grunting noise as her son dumps a puppy onto her lap.

“It’s a puppy, mom-“ Mac explains without being prompted. “I won him at school as a prize. Can I keep him? I’ll scream if you say no. I’ll-”

“I’m not feeding this thing.” Mac’s mother shoves the puppy off her lap when it starts to lunge for the cigarette dangling from her mouth. “And I’m drowning it in the tub if it shits on the floor.”

“See, Charlie, they’re bonding already,” Mac says, grinning ear to ear, as the puppy starts to eat a cigarette butt off the floor.

***

Sometimes characters in movies can talk to animals or ghosts or other beings that can’t communicate good with people. Mac can talk to his mom.

“Goodnight, mom.” If she changes the channel at the commercial, that means she’s wishing him sweet dreams. If she just lets the commercial play, that means she’s telling him to look out for bed bugs.

“Mom, how was your day?” If she grunts, it was a good day. If she silently takes another drag, the Jiffylube has tired her out and he needs to give her space tonight. 

Sometimes she throws him a curveball, but he always figures out when getting up to make more coffee she means she’s going to stay up late until he gets home that night or that when she tells him to take the money off the counter and go buy the groceries it’s because she trusts him. When she tells him to light her cigarette, that’s basically her saying she loves him in this secret language they have. They have whole conversations in her pursed lips, her grunts, her staring out the window and her pushing him out of the way of the TV when he tells her about school. Like twins, but mother and son. They have walkie-talkies tuned into each other and no one else can see. 

“Bye, mom.” He waits for her to stub out her smoke, which tells him she loves him and wants him to have a good day at school, and then he pushes his scarf over his nose to wait for the six-forty-five ay-em bus.

***

“In the middle of the night?” Charlie takes the Swiss from the sandwich they’re deconstructing, individual elements separated onto wax paper as they divvy their spoils from the corner store.

“Yeah, dude. And they took my toys, too. ‘Contraband’. They said that dad kept a bunch of drugs in Murphy.” Mac takes the turkey meat, hoping Charlie will go for the lettuce. As far as Mac’s concerned, lettuce tastes like wet paper and mold. He’s pretty sure people who say they eat salads all the time are all either lying or just total inventions of television. “He took the little speaker thing out and put a bag of drugs in and then sewed Murphy back up.”

“Are you going to get your toys back?” Charlie pours out their baggie of chips. Per tradition, the broken ones are his, and those that survived intact are Mac’s. They always figure that’s fair, since there are more broken ones but they aren’t as big.

“My mom says to stop fucking asking so I don’t think so- oh, come on, bro, you definitely squished the bag. There are like, two chips that aren’t broken.”

“Did not. You walked with me the whole way here, you would have seen.” Charlie picks the unbroken chips out into a pile for Mac and then adds a few half-chips, giving Mac a look like Charlie expects fawning appreciation for the sacrifice. “That sucks, dude. Murphy was a badass toy.”

“Yeah.” Mac takes his slice of bread, the one with mayonnaise while Charlie gets the one that’s touched the tomatoes.

Charlie shuffles his chips around, then licks some of the grease off his fingertips. “Everything bad always happens in the middle of the night.”

Mac knows that’s not true, but he likes the idea of bad things happening on a schedule, nice and predictable, like sunrise and sunset are gates to keep them in one place. He pours their M&Ms onto the wax paper, red and yellow for him, green and brown for Charlie, blue split down the middle. “Well, yeah. During the day it’s the two of us together, and no one fucks with us.”

***

“You’re not a worm, Charlie, you’re a pig. That’s why you’re in blankets!”

“I don’t want to be a pig, I want to be a worm!” Charlie’s laughing, squirming out of the cone of blankets Mac’s rolled him into. “Pigs don’t wear blankets either!”

“Pigs absolutely wear blankets.” Mac rolls Charlie up tighter, a little Charlie burrito or pressed flower with his head and toes sticking out. Mac’s taking this seriously, which just makes Charlie giggle more, especially when Mac threatens to fart on Charlie if he doesn’t admit that he isn’t a worm. Mac’s sitting on Charlie and hollering about how Charle may be a midget but he isn’t small enough to be a worm when Mrs. Kelly comes in. Mrs. Kelly always smiles at Charlie laughing like she’s just turned around out of a dark corner and found out the sun is shining. The bright, bright red lipstick makes her teeth pop, and her eyes disappear somewhere in the heavy dark lashes and bruise-ish blue shimmers.

“Oh, I hate to break you boys up.” She clasps her hands in front of her as if she’s looking at kittens in a store. “Ronnie, honey, it’s time to go home. I have some friends coming over for dinner and Charlie needs to go to bed early. We don’t want my Charlie boy’s immune system getting run down staying up late.” 

“Aw, man,” Charlie grumbles, wriggling out of the blankets.

Mac helps unroll him. “Charlie can come stay at my place. My mom won’t mind.”

“I don’t think that’s a very good idea, sweetie. Now let’s get your backpack put together so you can get home safe and sound while it’s still light out.” She ruffles his hair as she walks past him to pick through the coats and clothes by the front door to find his things.

Mac would whine, but he knows better by now. Mrs. Kelly hasn’t let Charlie have a sleepover at Mac’s house since Mac’s dad got arrested.

***

The first time Mac saw the fridge at Charlie’s house, he didn’t realize that that was what it was; it looked, instead, like a collage, scales of construction paper covered in scribbles flaking off the door, thin magnets with the name of the local grocery store pinning them as best they could. Every time Charlie finishes a picture, Mrs. Kelly displays it, only taking them down when she’s run out of magnets to affix new ones up. Over the years it becomes a background reflection of Charlie’s artistic interests as Charlie’s pictures graduate from crayons to markers to ballpoint pen and as his subjects evolve from blobby stick-figures to vermin to his current muses, cartoonish suns and spiders and dark humanoid creatures with scribbles for faces.

When Mac’s making himself pop-tarts every morning, drinking milk from the carton so he’ll get tall and strong, he looks at his own fridge, blank as an empty canvas. There’s a scuff on the front, and that fact that it’s surrounded by so much white space makes the mark look all the more glaring. 

In second grade Mac gives Mrs. Kelly a cut-out valentine, and she thanks him and smudges marker off his nose with her thumb, but she doesn’t put it on the fridge with Charlie’s. He doesn’t know where it ends up going. He tries a few more times, giving her pictures, trying to blow up Charlie’s spot a little. It’s no use; Mrs. Kelly just takes the artwork, teases him that his mom’s lucky to have such a generous and creative little boy, and then magics it away as soon as his back is turned.

“Dude,” Charlie hisses one day after Mrs. Kelly graciously takes another smiling stick-figure rendition of herself and heads upstairs to get dressed up for the night. “Why are you trying to steal my mom?”

Mac blows a raspberry. “That’s retarded, Charlie. You can’t steal moms.” 

“Well, if you could, you can have her. She’s not that great.” Charlie goes back to his drawing, a big black spiral with pen scratches heavy enough that later, Mac can still see the shape carved into the wood of the table. 

One day Mac gives up on waiting for moms to recognize his artistic genius. He gets proactive. He tapes a drawing over the scuff on the fridge, because that’s where these things should go, and his mom doesn’t take it down, which is proof that she likes it too.

***

Once you go to jail once you can’t help but go back. His dad talks about how addicts will always come back for another hit, so you just have to make sure they’re coming back to you and not the competition. Mac asks his dad once if his dad’s addicted to jail and his dad says something about gutting his probation officer like a fish. It’s fine, though; jail is temporary, and Mac can say his dad’s on a business trip and it isn’t lying, if God even notices lies anymore. Jail is always over in a few months. His dad comes home with more grey in his hair and another staples-and-soot tattoo and a shittier temper, which is way more than those poor loser kids with deadbeats can say.

But this time it’s not jail, it’s _prison_ , and his dad won’t be back for four years.

Jail is temporary. Prison is permanent. Mac can’t even imagine himself at thirteen.

***

They’re through another marathon homework session - that’s how Mac likes to think of any time they spend more than twenty minutes on any task for school - and the grueling work of a book report on _Where the Red Fern Grows_ has his and Charlie’s stomachs rumbling. The book report is mostly just Mac’s globby handwriting explaining why his dog Poppins is so much better than the dogs in the book they didn’t read, on account of Poppins being real and not fictionative, but they spent a long time on it and they feel like they ought to feast like kings on whatever mystery food is in the cans in Mrs. Kelly’s pantry. She puts a fork, spoon and knife with a napkin out for each of them, as if they’re in a fancy restaurant instead of a cramped kitchen with water stains on the ceiling.

Mac kicks his feet under the table, thinking of the speech their teacher gave them about nutrition yesterday. “Why don’t you have any fruit in the house?”

“Well,” Mrs. Kelly says, placing bowls of spaghettios in front of Mac and Charlie, “do you boys know how nature makes poisonous frogs bright colors so animals know not to eat them? Plants are like that too. Bright colors tell us the skins are toxic.”

Mac starts in on his spaghettios, thinking of all the things he likes to eat that are bright colors. He bites his lip. “What about Hi-C? Or candy?”

Mrs. Kelly shakes her head. “No, sweetie. Those are made by people. It’s alright if they’re bright colors.”

Charlie puts a sugar cube from the table into his spaghettios and watches it melt, rolling his eyes, but from that day on Mac peels his fruit just in case.

***

The letter got lost in the mail. The letter got lost in the mail and anyway, the postal workers are on strike again. Or they were, but they aren’t anymore, but there are still a few holdouts or postmen who don’t know the strike is over. And even if they did get the letter, it sat at the bottom of their bag for a long time, because this was a really busy week for mail on account of the holiday, and on account of the backlog from the strike. And even when they did deliver the letter the people processing it at the prison were slow, because they were getting slammed by the same backlog from the strike, and they have to examine every letter one-by-one in case someone taped acid paper into a birthday card. And even when it did get processed it costs a lot of money to buy pens and envelopes and stamps and prisoners only make three cents an hour, so it takes a while to get the money together to write a return letter. And the return letter has to go through processing again, in case someone’s sending escape plans to people on the outside, and then the postal workers might lose it or be on strike again, or have not yet heard that the strike is over.

These are the reasons Mac doesn’t get letters from his dad.

***

There are seven stairs to the room in the church with the youth group, curling around the wall, plush red carpet fraying at the edge of each step. Mac likes to kick his shoes off before he goes up them, not out of reverence but because the carpet feels good under his socks. On any given day of the week, he’d prefer to be spending his afternoons with Charlie instead of at with the youth group doing Bible study, but it’s allergy season and Charlie’s mom is taking him to doctor’s appointments almost every day to make sure he doesn’t have whooping cough or cancer. Mac’s relieved that his mom doesn’t care if he gets cancer, because Charlie always has stories about how the doctor jabs him full of needles and chastises him for eating the lollipop stick.

The youth group isn’t exciting, but it’s better than school or detention. Everyone’s on the same page here, and no one gives a fuck how good you are at math or spelling. The pastor chooses stories from the Bible that are badass and violent, about Salomé beheading John the Baptist or about Moses smiting the firstborn sons of the Egyptians. And all Mac has to do is sit there on that soft red carpet and hold onto the sentiment _God loves you_ like it’s a warm puppy curled up in his lap.

 _God loves you_ , even if you can’t see Him. _God loves you_ , even though you were born sinning. _God loves you_ , even though He sends floods and hurricanes and food poisoning and murder and flat bike tires and ringworm and stillborn babies.

One day as he’s walking home from the one shady convenience store that doesn’t care that he’s obviously too young to buy his mom’s cigarettes, he has a _revelation_. He decides he wants to be a priest.

***

There’s some asshole down the street who beats his girlfriend, and some bigger asshole on the block who always calls the cops when the girlfriend starts screaming. About once a week Mac will wake up at one in the morning to the sound of sirens approaching and will feel his whole body pull in along his spine, as if each individual muscle and organ is trying to cower from the blue and red lights flashing around on the ceiling and take shelter under his ribs. It’s the lights that bother him, not the noise. Even with the blinds all the way down they sneak through the slats and cut bright lines across the poster of Arnold Schwarzenegger he and Charlie stole from Blockbuster and the sticker of Jesus Christ Mac’s taped up above the bed. He’s glad he put them up there; when he’s half-asleep he forgets they’re just pictures and only remembers that they’re watching over him.

He feels like all his breath is in his lips and not his chest. His fingers feel numb. Some nights he stays right there in bed, staring at the men on the ceiling, transfixed in hypotheticals that just get worse and worse. Some nights he finds the balls to get up and walk, barefoot and in his oversized t-shirt, down the hall to his parents’ room, and he coaxes the door open as quietly as he can. He knows if she knew he was peeking in, she’d start locking the door every night. He knows if he woke her up, even by accident, she’d throw the alarm clock at him.

His mom’s still there, rattling sleep apnea barely audible over the sound of the ceiling fan always on. Bottle of cheap whiskey on the nightstand and cigarette butts still giving off sighs of smoke in the ashtray. Curtains drawn like the room is a cave or a womb, closed-off and secure. Mac slips the door back closed to return her to her inviolate fortress, taking a wobbly but deeper breath because no one came in the night to arrest her and take her away too. And he crawls back into his bed and if he sleeps at all, he wakes up tired.

One night he hears the couple fighting and the girlfriend screaming for help and it just goes on and on with no police, and Mac thinks, _good_. He hopes the guy breaks that bitch’s neck so there’s never another reason to bring the cops to their street again.

***

For almost a year, Charlie seems to shrink, not in size but just in the way he navigates the world around him. It takes Mac a few months to piece together that it’s because Charlie’s moving away when other people try to touch him, like he’s placing an extra two inches of space between his body and theirs. When Mrs. Kelly tries to give Charlie a kiss goodbye as they head to the bus, Charlie squirms away; he cringes from his uncle when his uncle tries to playfully slap him on the shoulder; he sits out tussling games at recess. For a while, Mac even appreciates it. He’s special, as the one person who can horse around with Charlie without getting bitten, who can hug Charlie without Charlie wriggling, the one who spends sleepovers nose-to-nose with Charlie between the air mattress and the big stained comforter.

But eventually Charlie starts to shrug off Mac’s embraces and starts to turn down invitations to wrestle or tag, and no matter how hard Mac tries Charlie seems to keep tending to that two inches of extra space as if it were a moat he were digging out. One day Mac tries to get the jump on Charlie with a surprise ninja bear hug and Charlie twists around, shoves Mac away and says “dude, stop” in a tone that feels like a punch in the nose.

When Charlie seems to recant months later, resting his head against Mac’s shoulder while they watch _The Karate Kid_ for the thousandth time, Mac realizes he hasn’t hugged or been hugged since Christmas.

***

Mac gets what he wants from his mom by yelling and whining, but his favorite moments with her are the quiet ones, where she watches TV and he rests his head against her thigh on the couch. If he doesn’t ask too many questions about what’s happening in his mom’s shows or what people are talking about on the nightly news, and if he doesn’t fidget and wriggle around too much, she lets him stay there for hours until he falls asleep, and when he wakes up her blanket will be wrapped around him, crisp with cigarette smoke. Some nights she’ll let him take sips of the scotch she nurses, so long as he refills her glass; he tries to do it just the way Sam Malone does, and one night she tells him he’s getting good at it. 

Scotch, rain, cigarettes and gas-station gasoline are his very favorite smells.

***

“Buddy,” Mac whispers, “you’ve got to stop pissing the bed or I’m not sleeping over anymore.”

Mac stuffs the comforter and Charlie’s pajamas into the tub and runs the tap while Charlie walks on the deflating air mattress to flatten it out. The first time they tried to clean up after Charlie wet the bed, they tried to use a hairdryer and the combination of noise and stink woke Mrs. Kelly up and turned it into a whole ordeal. Now it’s a covert operation, a practiced sequence of rinsing the plastic mattress and soaking the covers overnight before catching a few last zees buried in laundry. If it weren’t in the middle of the night it would be fun, like a heist where the score is a shared secret and not getting caught.

“Mac? Are you really going to stop sleeping over?”

“If you don’t stop peeing on me at night.” Mac hums a hymn from church at a way-too-fast tempo while he waits for the tub to fill. 

“Are you going to stop being friends with me?”

“What?” Mac kills the faucet and looks over at Charlie, who’s already wiggled his way into an oversized t-shirt. He looks like he’s at the barbershop, all head and an expanse of fabric pouring down from his neck.

“I don’t know. Everyone at school says I’m weird and smelly and no one wants to be friends with me. Someone said I was the weirdest kid that ever existed.”

“That’s so stupid, Charlie. There are real weirdos out there. There are some kids that are born stuck together or born with missing eyelids. My cousin told me there are some kids who have their skin on inside out.” Mac turns on the bathroom fan so the smell of piss gets hustled towards the open window. “I’m going to keep being your friend unless someone else pays me a lot of money not to.”

Everyone they know is broke, so that’s as good as forever.

***

What gets spoken to Mac, the very last time he came to his mother with skinned knees from riding his bike into the curb and doing an awesome tumble up onto the sidewalk, what words get laid on him between rough swabs of baby-wipe and Peter Pan band-aids, what has time during the commercials on his mom’s TV: “you don’t know how lucky you are that the church condemns abortion.”

What Mac hears: “Jesus really did you a solid, kid.”

***

One of the best things about having a dog is that when the weather sucks, you can still play with them indoors. Mac and Charlie are playing “animal doctor”, pushing down on Poppins’ stomach to try to get him to puke up the Halloween candy they force-fed him. It’s a nice distraction from the fact that the rain is slamming down like ballbearings on the roof and dripping grey water into a bucket by the stairs, plus, Mac points out, it’s good practice for when they get older and become real animal doctors like Charlie wants.

This time Charlie just looks skeptical when Mac talks about their futures as veterinarians (and baseball players and dojo owners and tractor drivers all at the same time, as if occupations are like charms girls collect on bracelets), and the way he squeezes down on Poppins’ stomach is half-hearted. 

“What’s up, buddy?”

“Nothing. I just don’t think we’re going to be animal doctors. I heard you have to go to college. Expensive vet school, too.”

Mac wants to protest, but he thinks about his mom swatting his hand for trying to take a dollar from her wallet for the collection plate, and he thinks about the fact that he doesn’t get breakfast on school days anymore since the foodstamps people found out his dad isn’t actually in the household, and he thinks about how he can’t even name a single person he knows who’s actually been to college. And he thinks Charlie might have a point.

Still.

“Well, what about zookeepers? I’ve never heard of zookeeper school.” He turns his concern from Poppins to Charlie, who’s staring past the floor. Charlie, who’s watching their first future wither and fall from the stem. Mac bites his lip. “Ooh, or we can be bank robbers and use the money to buy college.”

Charlie shrugs. “I kind of don’t want to do school at all.”

“Well, yeah, school sucks. Zookeepers it is.” Mac jerks back as Poppins snaps at him, then holds the dog back down. “God damn it, that was close.”

***

Mac knows he’s Charlie’s best friend because not only does he do Charlie’s homework, but when the teachers catch wise and Charlie fingers Mac as his accomplice, Mac doesn’t even stay mad for very long. He forgives Charlie by the next day and switches up his handwriting when he does Charlie’s next assignment.

Mac knows Charlie’s his best friend because even though it’s cold as a witch’s tit outside and even though they both know Mac won’t be allowed into visitation without his mom present, Charlie still sits with him while he waits for the bus to Eastern Correctional Institution, two hours away.

***

His dad called collect, and his dad asked to talk to him and not his mom, and as soon as Mac heard the words “son, I found out what you can do to really make me proud” Mac knows how the archangel felt tasked with announcing the son of God. His whole body feels breathy and airy, as if all the _purpose_ running through it is a vapor lighter than oxygen. Most of the time his days are giant unmarked oncoming hours for him and Charlie to fill with make-believe and school and exploring the guts of the dump, but today Mac’s got a mission, an anchor, a bright sun his whole being gravitates towards like flowerhead. He’s giddy when he unwraps five-dollar bills from the roll in Mrs. Kelly’s dresser drawer that she isn’t that great at hiding. Cash is best, his dad said, because there’s no extra charge to put cash on a commissary like there is with checks. 

He’s not even going to ask Jesus for forgiveness on this one, because toothpaste in prison is expensive and Mrs. Kelly always says he may as well be family.

***

Every once in a while Mac and Charlie get spurred into feverish creativity, usually by some burst of ambition larger than their capabilities. They’re going to make a billboard for their new businesses where they’ll be the youngest ever self-made billionaires; they’re going to make a comic book that gets even more popular than Batman; they’re going to learn magic and post flyers all over the city to fill the stadium for their big show. Mac designates himself the business side of their operation with Charlie as the creative side, right brain and left brain, which Charlie says doesn’t make any sense because Mac’s left-handed. They’ll sit on the floor in the Kelly living room, surrounded by cut up papers, markers, tape, and the open bottle of glue they keep passing back and forth. Charlie draws and Mac collages.

One day they find a bottle of schnapps Mrs. Kelly hid in her closet and they get drunk while they work, really _really_ drunk, and all of Charlie’s drawings are scribbles and smears and Mac’s not even trying to cut them into shapes anymore. He lays on his back and watches the ceiling tilt back and forth. Charlie holds up a sketch of a guy in silver with the sun behind him and says “I just made a superhero version of you, dude” and Mac wants to hold onto this moment, but he can already feel the memory falling right out of him.

***

Mac imagines the prison reception as a dam in a river with a drowning man pressed against the concrete by the current, and that once the gate opens to start the rescue there’s going to be a sluice of garbage and sewage flooding out too. Or it’s like the skin stretched tight and red over an ingrown toe, where letting everything out is so important and feels so good but it’s horrible, too, all at the same time. 

That’s how packing up a change of his dad’s clothes so his dad doesn’t have to come home in blues feels. Like something is about to happen, and it will be as grand and awesome and terrible as an angel.

***

Mac shrugs off his jacket and sets up the supplies for their project on dented, rust-covered files cabinet that’s been a fixture of the dump for as long as they can remember. He glances over at Charlie picking up a twist-tab from a beer can on the ground. “Dude, don’t eat those, that’s gross.” 

“I’m not just going to leave it there.” Charlie swallows. “So how’s this supposed to work?”

Mac gestures at their supplies: a videocamera held together with duct tape and a bottle of whiskey they swiped from Mrs. Kelly. “We need a board.”

“I don’t think you’re going to be able to break a board, dude. We need to start with cardboard. There’s some wet boxes over here.” Charlie watches Mac dig around in a pile of trash and pull out a piece of wood. “You’re going to hurt your toes.”

“I know what I’m doing, Charlie. The alcohol gets you in this zen state where you can’t feel pain. Asians call it ‘drunken fist’.” He straightens up enough to gesture with his hands as if he were displaying a marquee with that title.

“That’s not a real thing, dude.” Charlie picks another tab off the ground. “Besides, you’re not using your fist, you’re using your foot. You should be trying to do ‘drunken kicks’.”

“Whatever.” Mac leans his selected board against the file cabinet and twists open the whiskey bottle. He recoils a little. It smells like handsoap, but also like metal, and maybe like the urgent care clinic. He can’t imagine how anyone invented a drink that smelled like this and then decided to try actually drinking it. “Are you sure this bottle’s good? Maybe it’s expired.”

Charlie shrugs. “Alcohol doesn’t expire, it’s made from expire, like expired things, _and_ my mom was drinking from it this morning. You want to see if we can get some beers from her fridge instead?”

“We’re going to lose all the good light if we do that.” Mac looks into the horizon in a manner he hopes looks thoughtful. He doesn’t know anything about what counts as ‘good light’, but people who say it look like they know what they’re doing. So he thinks _bottoms up_ to himself and he takes a big slug, coughing after he swallows. “Dude, this is nasty.”

Charlie starts to fiddle with the videocamera as Mac keeps drinking. “This was your idea.”

It takes Mac a while to get good and drunk, on account of having to stop after each swallow and wince and work his courage back up again. It gets a little easier when he manages to pick up the pace and the burn settles down his throat and stomach as an ebbing and flowing constant, rather than outright starting and stopping. At some point he and Charlie start trading it back and forth, picking up little pieces of trash and throwing them at the rats and squirrels that slink around the dump between swaps. Charlie finds a roller-skate in a pile of garbage, and they spend a good twenty minutes trying to get it to roll around upright without them holding it. Eventually Charlie finds a broom handle and they entertain themselves by sliding the end of it into the heel of the skate and making the skate do little jumps over aluminum cans.

The whiskey makes Mac feels like he’s floating inside his own skin, like there’s this soft, cottony layer between his muscles and the outside world. It takes the chill out of the afternoon air. The taste sucks, but at least, unlike beer, he doesn’t have to drink a lot of it to get to this nice fuzzed-out state. Every time he and Charlie have stolen beers they’ve had to drink enough to make them burp for hours. As they lose interest in the roller-skate, Mac gets up and retrieves his wooden board, giving it to Charlie to hold.

“Are you zen or whatever?” Charlie holds the board up, looking like he still thinks this is a stupid idea.

“Totally.” Mac turns the videocamera on and perches it on the top of the file cabinet. They can edit the setup out in ‘post’, whatever that is. Maybe it means taking it to the U.S.P.S. “Alright, if I’m going to break it I need you to hold it more tighter, otherwise I’m just going to kick it out of your hands and it’ll go flying off somewhere.”

“Uh huh. Alright.” 

Mac readies himself. The fighting stances he sees in the movies always feel stiff and awkward, so he makes up his own, but that’s essentially what Bruce Lee did with J.K.D., making his own martial arts. The alcohol makes him woozy, but it does also make the world gentler on his skin, so this must be the perfect state of grace and fluidity. He throws a kick with all the confidence in the world that his aim is true.

Neither his kick nor his scream come out at manly and professional as he’d hoped they would. He drops to the ground, hands grabbing at his ankle, violent pain lancing up from the top of his foot to his knee, while Charlie chucks the board away and runs to his side. Charlie wraps an arm around him.

“I think I heard a crack, dude-“ Charlie hugs Mac’s shoulders tight, but Mac can’t hear anything. He’s got his jaw clenched so tight that his teeth are sending thunderbolts through his temples. His whole focus is shrunk down to the insane pain in his foot, the pain alcohol doesn’t even touch. He bites his lip hard enough that his gums sting, telling himself that it’s just that toes are sensitive, that there’s no real damage, that it’s all just immediate pain and not longterm injury. 

“Don’t you dare say ‘I told you so’, don’t you fucking do that, Charlie!” He shouts and he can barely hear his words. “Fucking Chinese bullshit!”

Charlie doesn’t. Instead Charlie presses on Mac’s back to rock him backwards and forwards while the pain from Mac’s foot goes from stabbing to throbbing, then throbbing to pulsing, while Mac successfully stifles tears with purposeful envisioning of arcades and waterparks and any good place that isn’t here and now, while his tension gives way to just shaking. Then Charlie gets up and takes the tape out of the videocamera and tosses it, Frisbee-style, somewhere into the dump.

***

The Baseball Hall of Fame. The Rock ’n’ Roll Hall of Fame. Tokyo. Las Vegas. The Great Wall of China. The biggest rubber band ball in the world. Xanadu. Hollywood. The Linc. The Poconos. Bethlehem. Miami. The biggest, widest canyon in Arizona where they can be alone and talk for hours and hours and run around and play catch.

“You know, kid, that’s not what they mean when they talk about a parole plan,” the officer at intake says.

***

Prison is, ironically, a place that steals from people. It steals years of their lives and all of their money and whatever personal property they had, and it steals their patience. If Mac didn’t just get smacked in the face, he’d think prison steals their love, too.

Two nights ago Mac asked God to give him a sign his dad was okay, that there was still a person inside the man who doesn’t look at him and barely seems home more than when he was locked up and acts like he doesn’t even hear Mac when Mac presents him with idea after idea of the fun things they can do and the cool places they can go, and God provided with a strike to the jaw. It’s better than a hug. It’s like a hug you get when the person hitting you trusts you can take it, when they think you’re strong enough to just shake it off. Just like God, who only gives you as much as you can handle. His dad must be so proud of him, knowing he can handle it, knowing he’s a man now instead of a little kid. And it didn’t even hurt that bad. It only hurt because his head hit the wall.

It didn’t hurt as bad as how hard he’s breathing right now as he sprints down the streets to Charlie’s house. Nothing hurts as bad as the raw red knives of cold night winter air cutting throat-to-lungs. The stars are like a rash of acne across the dark sky. 

He tattoos the door with his knuckles, rings the doorbell so fast the sound doesn’t have time to reset between button-presses, and after a wait that feels like twenty years but probably is closer to forty-five seconds he hears Mrs. Kelly on the other side of the door, knows she’s assessing him through the peephole. He probably scared the shit out of her, outright assaulting her front door in the middle of the night.

“Sorry, Mrs. Kelly!”

“It’s past midnight, Ronnie— oh, oh my. Here, sweetie, you’re bleeding, you’re going to get contagions all over your shirt.” She grabs tissues from a box next to the coatrack - there are tissue boxes throughout the house, a perennial appearance when cold and flu season kicks in - and offers it to him. He presses a balled-up Kleenex against the cut on his lip, which is oozing more than dripping now.

“Is Charlie a-?“

“Shh, Charlie’s sleeping. He needs his rest.” She ushers Mac into the kitchen. “Are you okay?”

“What? Yeah, why wouldn’t I be okay?” The Kleenex disintegrates slightly under a glob of bloody spit, and he swaps it out. He knows you don’t just run up on someone’s house in the middle of the night with a split lip over nothing, but he feels okay. He knows he’s okay. He expects her to ask what happened, and then he can prove to her how okay he is, how alive he feels with the fact that his dad noticed he was there.

But Mrs. Kelly doesn’t ask. Instead she gets a little basket-looking sewing kit she has on top of the fridge and opens it, and instead of spools of thread and needles there’s a little bottle of iodine, butterfly band-aids and sanitized wipes in tearaway packages. She has him sit on the kitchen counter because it’s easier to see his face and she dabs at the cut with the wipes.

She didn’t ask so he just starts talking.

“I was walking home and these three big guys, they must have seen my backpack and they jumped me.” He should leave the story there, but he keeps going, rolling himself out into an action movie scene. “And all my instincts were like, karate. So I chopped one guy in the neck and then kicked the other guy in the crotch and then the biggest guy, you know, the more bigger of the three of them, I grabbed him in this hold that was kind of jiu jitsu but still pretty badass, I mean, after he punched me and got me in the mouth, and he was out like a light, and then the other two ran off.”

“Oh. That sounds very scary, dear.” She continues to dab the blood away from his mouth between words, as if he’s speaking in some other language.

He’s been a legitimate teenager for three weeks and she still talks to him like he’s a little baby. He has this urge to correct her, this snake crawling up from his stomach to his throat going _no, my name isn’t Ronnie, and I wasn’t scared, and I’m just a dude who got into an awesome brawl_ but the smooth wipe on his chin feels good and he actually feels like each breath he takes is filling his lungs all the way up now for the first time since his dad got back. He’s breathing too much air to corral it into an objection.

He feels sick, suddenly. He doesn’t know what it is that set his dad off, just that he has to push it down until it suffocates. He has to crush it, bury it, kill it, karate-chop it, roundhouse kick it, stamp it, punch it into the ground, whatever. He’s always imagined this grey blob that he’s fighting against, this muddy cell of grime, and he beats it into splattery pieces. But it never lasts, it always puts itself together and fights back. Whenever he turns to do a victory lap it peeks up over his shoulder like a cartoon devil.

Mrs. Kelly presses the tiny butterfly bandaid over his lower lip and steps back to let him off the counter. 

“Thanks, Mrs. Kelly. I should go home and make sure my mom isn’t worried.” He starts to leave and she stops him with a gingerly touch to the shoulder.

“Your house is seven blocks away and it’s dark, sweetie. Didn’t you say you just got attacked? You should stay here tonight. Ooh, I’ll go get the Christmas blankets from the closet, it’s about time of year I bring those out anyway.” She clutches her hands under her chin that way she does, and she scuttles out of the kitchen, and he sits there, not sure why he’s so relieved.

He walks across the kitchen and tries to call home, but no one picks up, and he can’t figure out how to leave a message from this phone.


End file.
